How to free up space in your Outlook.com mailbox?

Returning to the office after several weeks of vacation often requires a little time to regain all of your habits. Besides the shock of coming back to reality, you also very often have to deal with an email box full of messages that you don’t really know what to do with. While most are too dated to have retained an interest, others just don’t apply to you.

If this sounds like you and your inbox is on the verge of exploding, it’s time to do some sorting in your inbox. While most email services have built-in tools to help you clean up, not all of them are as simple or efficient as Gmail.

Read also: Six tips to free up space on your Gmail inbox

Faced with Microsoft’s webmail, it is quite difficult to know where to start. In the following lines, you will discover all the best practices for emptying your inbox and freeing up space on your storage.

1. Check the remaining storage space

While the information is easily accessible at the bottom of a Gmail inbox, figuring out how much storage space is left on Outlook takes a bit of practice.

To get the information, click the cogwheel icon to deploy the Settings pane, and click Show all Outlook settings.

Then go to the General section and go to the Storage menu. Outlook should display a preview of the occupancy level of your email storage space.

2. Make a vacuum from the storage assistant

Outlook’s storage manager allows you, if you wish, to completely empty certain folders in your inbox: junk mail, deleted items (in the trash, but still present), in your inbox, etc.

For unimportant folders, such as junk or deleted items, you can for example choose to empty them quickly by clicking on the Empty button. You can then choose to delete everything, or to delete the elements according to their age.

3. Delete the largest emails

What could be more effective in freeing up space in your inbox than by deleting the largest messages?

To do this, start by filtering the display of your messages by size. Click the Filter button, and then in the Sort section, choose Sort by size.

Outlook will then display messages (with attachments) first, considered to be Gigantic. Manually select the messages you want to delete (or click the check mark displayed next to Inbox to select all of them) and click Delete and then click OK.

To free up space on your inbox storage, don’t forget to empty the Trash containing the messages you deleted.

4. Delete recurring, oldest, or certain senders messages.

To make room in your mailbox, you can also search for mails from certain senders (newsletters, press releases, etc.) to delete them all at once.

To do this, click in the Search field and deploy the Outlook advanced search engine by clicking on the arrow.

The different options displayed in this search engine will allow you to quickly display all the messages received from a particular sender, including one or more keywords or specific objects (by copying and pasting a recurring phrase, for example example), with or without an attachment, or to search for emails received over a specific period.

Once the search results match your needs, you can select all the messages at once (or individually if you want to keep some), in order to delete them.

Again, once all the messages have been deleted, do not forget to empty the trash to make them permanently disappear from your inbox and thus free up space in the storage allocated to your e-mail.

5. Create rules

The ultimate step in preventing unnecessary inbox overcrowding, rules. Outlook, like any e-mail, allows you to create rules that automate certain tasks for you as soon as a new message arrives in your inbox.

Rather than wasting time manually deleting some sample messages you receive, you can have Outlook do it for you.

To create a new rule, click the cogwheel to display Settings and choose to Show all Outlook settings.

Then enter the Mail section, then click on Rules.

Then click on Add a new rule. Give your rule a name, select and fill in a condition, and choose the action Outlook should take.

You can, if necessary, add other actions or, on the contrary, add an exception. Then validate your rule by clicking on the Save button.

From now on, all the messages arriving in your inbox and corresponding to the rule defined in your rule will undergo the fate chosen in the action of your Rule. It is also possible to apply the rule to messages already received, which will allow you to immediately put them aside.

In our example, all incoming messages with the subject line “newsletter” will be automatically deleted.